


wilted

by macabre



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-06
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-09-15 09:15:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9228410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macabre/pseuds/macabre
Summary: The Winter Soldier’s new mission is to guard and protect. It’s a command that is not understood well; the asset has always been unleashed to kill, torture, kidnap. Not to guard anything. They don’t directly tell him what it is he’s guarding until they take him to it the next morning.It is a man. A very small man. Delicate in a way that makes him uncomfortable because he knows how easily he could kill him, without trying, without looking.AU: Steve is taken by HYDRA to be a guinea pig, and the Winter Soldier is assigned to guard him.





	

The Winter Soldier’s new mission is to guard and protect. It’s a command that is not understood well; the asset has always been unleashed to kill, torture, kidnap. Not to guard anything. They don’t directly tell him what it is he’s guarding until they take him to it the next morning.

It is a man. A very small man. Delicate in a way that makes him uncomfortable because he knows how easily he could kill him, without trying, without looking. Like if he breathes in his direction this man might snap in half. He’s smaller than many of the women he’s seen, with bones that poke out and look hallow. He wonders if he might fly away like a bird, and that’s why they want him to watch this man.

He’s kept in a small cell in a much larger building in the middle of a blizzard. Most of the personnel leaves due to weather, so there are other agents there, but few, and spread out. The soldier is left with his tiny man, so he sits outside the cell and tries not to think about anything but measuring the man’s breathing. Too slow, too swallow. Like he’s concentrating on breathing.

He wants to ask why he needs to watch him. What could he possibly do to any of them? But no one is here to ask, so he remains silent, even when little man speaks.

“Hello,” he says softly, as if he’s trying not to scare him of all people. He doesn’t reply. “Are you going to sit out there all day?”

He does, so he doesn’t need to answer him. A couple of days pass of the soldier pacing back and forth in front of the cell. For the most part, the blonde inside does nothing but curl in on himself in the corner. The soldier delivers rations to the man as scheduled, but the little man never finishes them. He wonders if he will be punished for it. 

This other man must sense his agitation. “Are you alright?” His voice is hoarse. In the back of his mind, the soldier tells himself to get him a fresh glass of water. 

His thoughts are a blur though, like speeding bullets and trains and other things he can’t accurately name right now. He’s never kept out of deep sleep long, and this mission already is growing long. Is he performing incorrectly? Is there something else to the mission, something he wasn’t expressly briefed on? It would not be the first time he was tested, and if he failed the test he would hurt for it. 

His head feels like it’s in splitting in two by the end of that day. There’s still a lack of other agents around, so he lets himself slip onto the floor like a puddle, but he keeps his eyes on his mission. The other man has scoot forward to the front of the cell for the first time, watching him too. At one point, he reaches through the bars and puts his hand on the ground, a few feet away from the asset. He bulks, sitting upright too fast, and feels physically sick for the first time in awhile. 

“You’re alright,” he says in a way that makes him confused and angry. His voice is unlike any he’s heard - a distant lack of hardness, of discipline. He growls at the man, so he pulls his hand back in. 

Then he lies back down, because his head. He must fall asleep - it’s been many days, and he’s not had deep sleep - because he hears something fade in. A shrill noise, a coughing noise - his mission is hunched over on his knees coughing wetly, and the asset knows it doesn’t sound right. He stands, peering inside the cell for anything that might be different - maybe he’s planning an ambush - but nothing has moved. There is an empty plastic cup for water, a rumpled blanket, and a coughing man. 

The soldier opens the cell door and pauses. What does he do? Protect, they said. Protect means they want him alive. He locks himself in and hovers over the bent figure. 

The other man has been coughing long enough that his eyes are red and watery. It’s almost painful to see the redness spreading across his skin - the collar of his shirt stretching down over a concave chest. It looks like someone threw boiling water on him.

He doesn’t have the training for this. He is unsure of how to handle the man. The other thing he can think is that his posture is all wrong, so he does the first thing he can think of - thrusts his hands under the man’s armpits and hauls him up. He gives a shout - his hand is colder than even his, the soldier idly remembers - and then the man hangs there like a ragdoll, too small for his feet to touch the ground.

His head rolls around on his shoulders, but when he glares at the soldier, something tightens in his chest. The eyes are blue - as blue as his - but somehow angrier. He hadn’t looked that angry in any of the time he’s been watching him. 

“Put me down.” 

The soldier drops him, but he doesn’t catch himself, so he has to catch him and hold him all the same. 

“You need to take deeper breaths,” he grunts. His voice sounds worse than little man’s. “Slower.”

“You think -” he wheezes, then coughs, then wheezes, “I don’t know, that?” Wheeze. He jams his eyes closed, neck loosening again. 

“Do you require medical maintenance?” Soldier isn’t sure medical is here. No one has come for them, he’s unsure of current weather conditions outside, but it is still very cold in the building.

“No. It’s just,” he puffs, fidgeting in his hold, “so cold. It’s hard, on my lungs.”

The asset keeps the man on his feet with one hand, his metal hand, then picks up the blanket with his other. He wraps it around him tightly, the blonde weakly struggling. They pause to look at each other, soldier wondering if he’s helped at all, then the man starts shaking and coughing again.

“I had the blanket before,” he says. “Wouldn’t happen to have another, would you?”

The soldier does not, so he thinks of the only other way to add addition warmth. He scoops the man up in his arms, then sits, not so gracefully on the cold floor. He places the mission’s back to his chest, stretching his legs in front between his own legs. He keeps his metal arm away from the man, but wraps the human one lightly around the front of the blanket so it won’t fall. 

“You’ve truly swaddled me like a baby now. Thanks,” he says after a few minutes, but he’s less wheezy already, and he stops fidgeting as much. His neck hangs forward, angling away from his chest. “What’s your name?” He asks, so lowly that even soldier has trouble hearing him.

He ignores him, because he doesn’t have a name, things do not have names. The man tilts an ear back towards him and asks again. Silence.

“You’re the only one who’s -” he says, but never finishes, and it’s not because of a cough. He shivers harder. “I’m Steve.”

The asset opens his mouth to say - something - but closes it. He doesn’t communicate outside of missions. The man is his mission, but the man isn’t HYRDA. That much is very clear. He wants to know why he’s there, why they’re keeping him alive, but he doesn’t. 

Steve drifts asleep, head rolling back so an ear lands on his chest. Paranoia begins to creep up on the soldier - he should not be found inside the cell with the prisoner - so he gently reclines the man as gently as possible, but gentle is not something he is practiced at, and Steve startles awake, thrashing about. 

“Don’t.” His hand covers an alarming percentage of Steve’s chest. “You’ll start coughing again.”

He stands and exits. By the time he’s outside the cell, Steve is shaking again. Soldier sees it easily from several feet away. “I’ll bring your rations. You should eat.”

He ends up heating up water for him too. Steve holds it between his hands and never drinks it, but seems to prefer it over the food. Once it grows cold, Steve lies down and the shaking intensifies. 

The soldier watches him for awhile, then brings another cup of hot water. They are porcelain cups. Steve could smash them, and use them against him, if only he wasn’t curled up so tightly. He doesn’t touch the second cup, although he does briefly open his eyes to glance at it. Then he slips them shut and coughs and shakes. 

The soldier shoves the cups away, then lies on the ground, picking Steve up and lying him across his body, rearranging the blanket so it’s tighter again. He still shivers, so the soldier folds both of his arms around him. He’s been well aware of how small Steve is, but holding him like this makes it almost frightening. 

Steve presses a chilled nose into his neck, and the soldier flinches. Steve moves his face away, so the soldier has to tuck his face back into his neck. “Stay.” So Steve does. At one point, he wiggles his arms around in the cocoon blanket so he can reach with his fingers exposed to latch on to the soldier’s chest plate. They gently probe forward, touching his neck.

He knows he should get up and leave the prisoner on his own, but he doesn’t. The feeling of such touch is intoxicating, and the fingers work their way up to his face. One toys with his hair. 

“I need to deliver rations.”

Steve doesn’t say anything. Instead, he tucks his nose back under his chin. His breath keeps his throat warm, and then the steady breathing pauses, and the soldier thinks later that this man had kissed his throat, but at the time he saw only obstinance when he needed to get up. He leaves Steve and doesn’t enter the cell again.

The weather breaks. Agents come back. The soldier is relieved from his post, he thinks to be put under.

They don’t put him under. 

They take him out for an assassination. It only takes three days, travel included, but it feels good to run and jump and kick. Kill. When he comes back, they tell him to report back to the cell block. 

He’s not sure what he’s done wrong. The execution was flawless. 

He’s also not sure it would be Steve still sitting in the cell - he had wondered if the cold got the best of him, but he’s there. The only prisoner. Today he looks worse than he did before. There’s a black eye and his clavicles stick out so much that they could cut his flesh hand. He stands when he sees the soldier, backs up against the wall with wide eyes, and the blanket falls from his shoulders. He is shirtless, and there are bruises and ugly puncture marks over his skin.

“No.” He croaks, shaking. “No.” He looks close to tears, and tears are something soldier recognizes. Pleading, too. He removes his goggles to look him over more. Steve marginally relaxes. 

“You’re back.” He eventually picks up his blanket. 

“Where’s your shirt?” 

Steve narrows his eyes at him, so soldier removes his muzzle too. Repeats the question, but the man just laughs. Or sobs. Turns his back to him, and sits in the corner. 

Soldier keeps post, but he smells death cornering in. Steve has stopped shaking in the corner and he is too quiet. No coughing. His confusion is turning into a headache that won’t go away. Why is he watching him? What will his next punishment be? He thinks a lot about trains. And snow. So much snow. His arm hurts in a way that indicates medical, but he can’t find anything wrong with it, so he stays put.

Soldier enters the cell and puts Steve in his lap. He doesn’t make a noise or move, so soldier hand feeds him what he could find outside of the instant food rations. He puts down a broth first, the lukewarm liquid making a mess of them both. Then he tries to get small bits of jerky down him. It would be the first solid food he’s been offered in awhile, and he doesn’t eat it, so soldier chews it for him and spits it back out into his hand. 

The man looks and acts like a corpse already. Soldier is accustomed to death, but not the slow kind. He decides to report it to his superior. 

“His state is rapidly deteriorating,” he says.

“He’ll be taken care of,” his superior says. Nothing else. Soldier goes back to his post, and no one else comes or goes in the prison ward. 

Steve isn’t moving. He could be dead. 

But then he coughs, so he isn’t dead yet. Soldier enters the cell, feeds him more broth. The broth is for the soldier, but he’ll eat the powder for now. He massages little man’s throat so he’ll swallow. Another night passes and he keeps Steve wrapped up in his arms. 

Soldier doesn’t know who he is anymore. There’s still a gun and multiple knives stuck to his body, but he’s nothing more than a nurse right now, and if ever there was a title he didn’t expect, it was nurse. 

Steve croaks. Soldier has no idea what he’s trying to say. His blue eyes are watery and his thin skin very pink. He wraps tiny, coldcoldcold fingers around the soldier’s neck. “Name?”

“No name,” soldier says, propping Steve up a little more in his arms. He hasn’t been lucid in two days. 

“Name.”

“Asset.”

Steve grunts, jamming his eyes shut. “Name.”

“Soldier.”

There is coughing, there is blood in the coughing. Steve’s head lags against his collar, and his little fingers brush over his face - cheek, lips, ears. 

“Angel,” he says so softly that soldier thinks it might be his actual last breath. His eyes are closed and his chest still. 

“Steve?” He shakes him, just a little. Steve swallows, so soldier tucks him under his chin and lets his breath warm the other’s face. 

Soldier knew it was the last night. In the morning, they come for Steve, and he’s not sure if Steve’s still got a heartbeat or not. He wasn’t able to check before they pried him from his hands, letting the blankets fall lifeless into his lap.

“Soldat.” 

He wonders if they might leave him to starve to death in the rotting cage. No. Someone takes him to a sleep chamber. He is thankful - happy, they say. He is happy, he thinks, to be put under. All he thinks about are Steve’s eyes and the last time they were open. 

They put him under. There are no dreams.

 

 

 

There is little sense of time, but soldier knows he hasn’t been under too long when the same personal who wake him are the same ones who put him down. They let him thaw in a thin blanket - and Steve - blue eyes - Steve - he had a blanket, just like this.

Steve is dead now. He expects the electricity to take the last thoughts of Steve, and soldier would be happy again to forget about how one skinny man dying in his arms was the worst pain he’s felt - but they don’t put him in the chair. They take him straight to superior. 

The soldier feels the chill down to his core still. He feels far more tired than he should. 

His next mission is a ride-a-long guarding the package. The package is a man - taller and broader than the soldier, but with fair blonde hair and skin, so unlike the majority of the agents he works with. 

And blue eyes. Chilling blue eyes.

They sit across from each other, staring, as the van rocks and rolls along the road. The soldier feels like he is drowning in blue. 

“You -” the man starts, reaching for him. The soldier flinches back, and the other agents in the back stiffen, fingers on the trigger. The blonde man sits back too, silent, his jaw working itself. When they stop, just the blonde man gets out, very quickly, and he’s in civilian clothes verses the soldier’s typical tactical gear.

He must be gathering information. 

The rest of them ride around in the van for awhile, park for a couple of hours, then drive. And pick up blonde man again. He looks the exact same, perhaps maybe more rumpled clothing. They drive on in silence.

He assumes it’s a mission success. 

When they return to base, they are led in separate directions. The soldier tries not to think about the blonde man. He doesn’t go to mission report - there is nothing to report. Instead, they put him in a little room, the same size as the cell, that only has a cot and toilet in it. He lies down and does not sleep. He doesn’t remove his gear, and he doesn’t take his finger off the trigger. 

A couple days later superior collects him. “New mission: guard and protect, yourself and other agents if necessary. You are not to kill him - bring him in alive, and only interfere if he’s rogue.”

He’s dropped off with the blonde man at the end of a short alley in a busy city. The other man doesn’t look at him, just disappears into the crowd, the soldier slipping between people close behind. The general mission parameters are for the other soldier to kill a rising general in the country, but he knows nothing about how he’s been instructed to approach the kill, so soldier follows him into a corporate building. It’s a shining example of globalized consumerism in the middle of a failing economy. 

They look out of place here. They’ll grab too much attention. They need to exit the building quickly, before cameras mark his uncovered face - 

“Hey.” The blond man pushes him into the stairwell. “Do you remember me?”

He doesn’t. This man’s shoulders could wrap around his entire front and eat him. He has to look up at blue eyes that are the right shade but surrounded by too much fat in his cheeks. The look of concern on his face is - not right. 

“Steve.”

“Yeah, I’m Steve.” He smiles at him. Did he ever smile before? He’s not convinced it is Steve, and every instinct he has tells him to get out of there now. Abort. 

“I had to wait for the trial runs to end before I could get you alone,” he says, his too warm hands actually bleeding through the leather on his top half. “We need to move quickly.”

The soldier’s head jerks, his hand on the knife around his back spasming. He could take him out now, drag his unconscious body back. Let them recalibrate the man. 

“Hey.” A hand moves up to his cheek, brushing through some of his hair. “I’m getting out while I can - while I can remember some things. I want you to come with me.”

His breath is warm too - ghosting across his face. He smells - sweet almost, like something the soldier once knew, before rations. Candy? A fruit? It’s hard for him to concentrate. He also needs to be recalibrated. 

“Look.” His other hand reaches slowly around his back, gently grasps the hand around the knife. “I know at least some of the things that have been done to you, because I’ve seen enough myself, but clearly you’re still in there somewhere.”

The soldier springs, all at once, thrusting the blonde man against the opposite side of the stairwell with a knife against his throat. He growls, barring his teeth, and Steve - or not-Steve - just quietly looks at him, not really struggling. 

“You were my angel,” he whispers, and the soldier tightens his grip with his metal hand on the other’s chest. He’s leaning forward, as much as he can, then the soldier can count the eyelashes - something he did in the cell to occupy the time - and honey, he thinks suddenly - the other man smells like honey.

Steve brushes his lips across the soldier’s cheek, and the soldier drops him. He takes a step towards the exit - but remembers his mission - he remembers dripping honey over dough too - remembers hot sticky nights somewhere other than a building where it almost always snows. 

“Come with me.”

The soldier does not dwell in things that do not belong to him. Things to be seen out in the sunlight. Food that isn’t instant, or liquid. Things with bright tastes. He does not need warmth. 

“I have to go now.” Steve sounds - like he’s dying. Soldier has heard this voice before, the pleading one. “I’m sorry.”

They are at a standstill, the soldier drowning again, his breath coming faster, but Steve slowly disappears backwards until his feet fit the stairs, and then he’s gone. He was only confident it was Steve when he heard him like that - in agony.

The soldier sits on the stairs and doesn’t move for awhile. He looks at his arm, the invasive one, for a long time. It’s getting colder in the stairs, so he clenches his hand into a fist, wraps it through the bars on one of the stairs and pulls.

The bar breaks of course, but not before it pries one of his plates up. It’s just enough for him to get his fingers around it and pull some more. The cut on his flesh fingers is deep, and blood runs into the metal, but he digs until he finds the tracker. 

Once he has jammed the plates back down and wrapped his injured hand in his glove, he plants the tracker and leaves the building. Other agents are close, he knows, but they don’t matter. It’s the other teams they’ll activate in a few hours time he needs to worry about.

He steals a car, he drives it for a few hours, then ditches it for another. He’s across a new country border by morning and from there he can plan more carefully. He makes it to Budapest within a week and decides to stay there for awhile because the language feels right and the buildings are ornate in a whole new way. He kills an entire squad of HYDRA that finds him out shopping in the market, one by one he lures them into the shadows. 

It’s time to move on, then. It would be safer for him to head east, but he thinks about blonde hair and an American accent, so he boards a cargo ship to New York and sits at Coney Island by himself, watching kids eat hot dogs and wondering if his rations were so bad. It is downright hot now, and people bare their skin so easily. He knows he is garnering attention in his long sleeves and hoodie, hat pulled down low. 

Despite all his layers, the sun still feels good, and he lets himself sit there with his eyes downcast, hoping no one stares for too long.

A set of feet stop in front of him. Under the brim of his cap, he sees a supremely pale chest, flat then concave. Slim hips, colorful shorts. He is hesitant to look up, maybe this stranger will go away, but this there’s a hand - moving ever so slowly towards him. It grazes his cheek, right over the spot that was kissed.

“Steve.”

“Angel.”

It’s Steve again - the real Steve. Tiny. Pale. Wheezy sounding, even in the sun. He smiles at him so brightly that soldier looks away, stands. Steve steps in front of him before he can walk away.

“You came home,” he says. “I hoped you would.”

“Mission parameters were to protect,” soldier says. “I could hear your accent. Just enough.” He adds, quietly. It was hard over the nasal noise in Steve’s voice, but he had heard it the first day even. 

“But this is your home too, you know?” Steve wraps his hand around the soldier’s metal hand, puts the other on his shoulder, bearing down with enough weight that the soldier leans down too, as if Steve could make him do anything. “Your name is James Buchanan Barnes, and you’ve been missing for almost eighty years.”

He wilts, shrinking away, but Steve follows him.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“It’s not me.”

“It is.”

“I’m the asset.”

“You’re an angel.”

Steve couldn’t physically restrain him, even on the brink of death the soldier could hurt him, but he feels trapped between this little man and the bench and the too warm sun and his head, tumbling constantly.

He could remember the taste of a hot dog. He didn’t want one, but he could taste it all the same. And the honey on Steve’s lips - he could taste it too. He could taste it when Steve had kissed his cheek.

“What happened to you?” he asks Steve. Maybe everything had been a hallucination, and Steve was dead, and the soldier was too. 

“Whatever they experimented on me with, it wasn’t permanent.” Steve pushes the soldier to sit back down, then sits so close to him that he’s half on top of him. He thinks about how they sat together in the cell. He wonders if they could do that now. 

“How did you escape?” Surely there were teams sent after him too, and how long had Steve been bigger to even stand a chance at fighting them?

Steve shakes his head. “I had help. They would help you too.”

They sit there in silence for awhile, other than Steve’s breathing. Even in good conditions, it is highly audible. The soldier closes his eyes and listens.

“James.” Steve reaches up, takes off his hat, turns his head towards his. “I’m glad you came home.”

He presses up against his side, and he is so warm. This little body, which couldn’t keep itself warm for so long. The soldier feels like some sort of ugly vegetation, taking up too much of the sun. He wilts, trying to look anything but Steve’s face, because he is too gentle looking, and now his cap is gone, and what if HYDRA finds them now? What if they spot the soldier and little, sweet Steve?

But soldier would kill them too, even out here in the open, and he would take Steve and run with him this time. 

“My fallen angel,” Steve whispers, pushing onto his toes off the bench. He kisses the soldier’s forehead, his right cheek, his left cheek, then his chin. 

“I’m glad you’re here,” Steve repeats, “because now I can take care of you.”


End file.
